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Bone-chilling cold returns Thursday

A snow squall watch is in effect for West Nipissing, North Bay, South River and Burk's Falls.

Conditions are favourable for lake effect snow squalls to develop from Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. Any persistent bands may give local accumulations of 15 centimetres in 12 hours.

Visibility may be suddenly reduced at times in heavy snow. Surfaces such as highways, roads, walkways and parking lots may become difficult to navigate due to accumulating snow.

The snow squalls are forecast to weaken tonight and, unfortunately, are too small and isolated to rid us of the persistent cold.

“If you look at it since (Dec.) 26, you have had no (stormy) weather,” says David Phillips, the senior climatologist at Environment Canada, explaining the lasting cold spell.

“That’s a key in the staying power of this cold air. Because what kicks it out is a storm — an Alberta Clipper or a Saskatchewan Slasher or a Texas Panhandle storm that kicks the cold air out,” he says.

“You get the snow and maybe freezing rain,” but the cold air is pushed away.

Our current cold air “is really from Siberia. It came over the top of the world and just flooded down the entire country and right down through the United States.

“It’s dense, it’s thick, it’s like molasses. And it fills all the little holes and edges and everything. You can’t kick it out.”

It started with a polar vortex, Phillips explains. Normally the polar vortex is a mass of cold air that goes around and around the North Pole. But it is a weak system to begin with, and if a warming climate weakens it further, it wobbles off course like a revolving top losing its spin.

“When it weakens, it sort of drifts southward,” Phillips says. “This is sort of the irony of climate change. If anything, it’s climate change that caused this cold weather because it allowed that polar vortex to weaken.

“With no mountains to stop it, it’s like molasses flowing on a tabletop. It just moves down there and (there is) nothing to kick it out. No storms.”

And while we are expected to get a break from the cold today with a forecast high of -11C and low of -19C, temperatures are expected to drop again Thursday and stay cold until Sunday.